To the city of fifteen minutes walking

Neither artificial intelligence nor the metaverse will define the cities of the future, but everything indicates that it will be something as mundane as the proximity of services. It is what is known as the city of fifteen minutes walking and in which cities such as Barcelona, ​​Paris, Bogotá, Shanghai or Melbourne already work.

In this new city model, based on walking, an urban element that is not always given the importance it requires takes on special relevance: sidewalks. Three researchers from the Complex Systems group (CoSIN3), from the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), from the UOC ((Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia)) have dedicated themselves to its study: Daniel Rhoads, Albert Solé Ribalta and Javier Borge Holthoefer.

“We have developed a flexible framework to test the robustness of the city’s sidewalk networks against the various mobility constraints of residents and have applied it to Barcelona,” explains Rhoads. The result: “Even a city that is friendly to pedestrians like Barcelona cannot withstand the fifteen-minute city when moderate physical mobility limitations are taken into account,” says the UOC researcher.

“Over the last hundred years, humanity has created cities designed for driving; now they are starting to adapt for walking,” says Rhoads. In the study, the authors discuss different approaches to improve the sidewalk network. “We propose a framework to assess multifactorial walkability using the percolation theory and information on pedestrian behaviour”, the researcher specifies.

The fifteen-minute walk city is an ambitious urban planning strategy to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants and reduce their dependence on vehicles. In the image, a sector of the city of Barcelona. (Photo: Amazings/NCYT)

The authors of the study have worked on a digital representation of the Barcelona sidewalk system, with information such as the width of the sidewalks, the slope and the level of risk based on traffic accident data. The method used allows us to see how network connectivity varies depending on the mobility needs of people. “A person in a wheelchair, for example, needs at least two meters of width and slopes that do not exceed two degrees,” Rhoads specifies. “By focusing the analysis on any point in the city, it can be found out how many basic services a person can access within a fifteen-minute walk, under any combination of conditions,” adds the expert.

The city of fifteen minutes on foot is a fairly recent proposal by urban planner Carlos Moreno, a Colombian living in Paris, where he is moving cars away from the city center. In broad strokes, Daniel Rhoads explains that this new urban model seeks to enable all those daily needs to be carried out on foot, in a reasonable amount of time: going to a supermarket, a doctor, a school, a park, a library or to a public transport stop. “It implies that all these services must be distributed throughout the entire territory of a city, but first it is necessary to define which services fall into the basic category and which are their optimal locations to reach the greatest number of people”, indicates the researcher. “Rebuilding cities is not easy,” he adds.

“With its policy of super islands, Barcelona is advancing towards this model. On a global scale, due to its reasonable size, its robust public transport system and the distribution of the population throughout the entire urban fabric, which alternates buildings residential and business, it can already be considered a fairly walkable city,” says Rhoads from the United States, the country where he lives. “Here the cities are much more horizontal, the distances are enormous and everything is designed for the car,” laments the expert.

The ultimate goal of the city of fifteen minutes is to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants. “Walking is a healthy form of exercise and by reducing combustion engine vehicle commuting, it improves air quality, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and minimizes the risk of road accidents,” says Rhoads. .

The study is titled “The inclusive 15-minute city: Walkability analysis with sidewalk networks”. And it has been published in the academic journal Computers Environment and Urban Systems. (Source: UOC)